Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-03-23/Interview/Transcript
Transcript of the Signpost's interview with Katherine Maher
Tony1: Katherine Maher, congratulations on your appointment.
- Katherine: Thank you so much Tony.
In announcing the appointment, the chair of the board gave you a really glowing reference; I think the worst thing he said about you was that you're "an excellent leader for the Foundation". It sounds ideal, but first I wanted to ask you about how your previous technology roles have prepared you for policy-making on the WMF's engineering and software development. This is a core challenge for the Foundation and it seems to be different, a little different anyway, from from what you encountered in your tech-related advocacy at Access Now, the World Bank, NDI ...
- Absolutely. My background is interesting I think for many folks at the Foundation and in the movement in terms of ... it touches on a lot of different things. It has been policy-focused at different times, advocacy-focused at different times, and actually quite programmatic—so, much more aligned with some of the work our teams in the community engagement team do, for example. And yet I've also run and project-managed projects where we actually developed software for various different purposes around serving user needs around health care for example when I was at UNICEF. So I've done a couple of different things; one thing that most of your listeners probably don't know is that very early on in my professional career, when I was at UNICEF, I actually worked on a team that developed MediaWiki extensions back in 2007 and 2008, and presented them at Wikimania Alexandria—and they were very focused on usability for users in ... we did some testing for users in East Africa, and then developed the extensions around that. So it's not my first time working with engineering teams or product or end-user-focused programs, but it is obviously a little bit different.
- So that doesn't answer your question, but I'm happy to answer your question now, which is that I don't believe I'll be doing any decision-making alone in this role. My goal and what I have found to be very successful in the past is to work with the folks who understand the issues and challenges and opportunities far better than myself, and that is true whether it is around policy-setting for the organisation, around understanding what our technical architecture and roadmap should be, how to prioritise products and how to work with our community members and colleagues within the community to understand what their needs are and how we should go about developing and deploying feature sets and products. So my goal is very much to be somebody who listens and works with various folks in the leadership team across the organisation and in the community to help identify what solutions are best, allocate resources effectively, help people prioritise, and give them the tools that they need to get the important work done. I see it as a facilitative role and I think that we've got some exciting opportunities coming up that can help us really articulate how we continue to develop software for the Foundation and for the movement; one of my priorities in next few weeks and months is in the hiring of a chief technology officer for the organisation.
So, you're right. Among the priorities the board has set you is to make progress in hiring the chief technology officer. How will that be done if the candidates don't know who the permanent executive director is, given that the CTO job description actually specifies close interaction with the executive director?
- It is a challenge. What I would say to that and what I would be looking for when reviewing candidates for the role is that we're ultimately looking for somebody who is mission-aligned and is here to do the work, and is somebody who can work within our community, our culture, and our values. We're looking to hire someone based on management and experience criteria, but also someone who has the approach that we think is going to be successful for within the organisation, that that person will be a good fit regardless of who the permanent ED might be. Because ideally we're looking for a permanent executive director who brings the same values of empowering those that they work with, sharing power with their community, and understanding really the core of what makes this movement successful.
It's going to put added pressure on the board to find a permanent executive director promptly, isn't it?
- I think the board is very motivated to find the right person for the role. I trust that they have a balance in their approach between speedy and successful, right? I think that they're being very thoughtful about what has worked in the past and what hasn't worked, how to incorporate lessons learned, and how to engage in the process in a way that we really are bringing in top candidates.
Is the Foundation an inherently satisfying place to work? People point to blurred cultural boundaries, unclear chains of command, lack of accountability, a sense among staff that throwing money at problems is enough ...
- Hmmm. Well, I think that if you look at some of the results that were presented from our recent engagement survey, you'll find that while staff have serious concerns and frustrations about improving the way that we communicate, for example within the organisation, providing a vision, and overall leadership and strategy, one thing that ranked incredibly high and was very consistent across the board was people were very proud of the mission and very proud of the work that they did. They also reported very high levels of engagement with their managers and with their teams. So I think that in the sense of work being good work, being meaningful work, having the opportunity to work directly with a mission and a community, I think that we're doing quite well there.
Is a new head of human resources a priority for you, given that the board does want you to start addressing the deep-rooted cultural problems that surfaced in that staff survey?
- Some of the issues that survey surfaced for us were around communication, for example in performance. And the human resources team has already begun work and introduced a set of programs and trainings for the organisation as of this week; so it is absolutely a priority that we address all of the concerns raised by the engagement survey. What I would say is that, yes, hiring a new head of human resources is a priority for us. The way that we are prioritising the recruitment starts with the board which is conducting the executive director search. We are already in a good place in terms of the CTO search: we have a job description, we have a process, and a search committee that has been pulled together. The next step will be looking at pulling together a job description for the head of human resources. And we anticipate moving on board with that within the next week and a half. So we have a number of open positions and we're looking forward to move forward on all of those in order to restore some of the capacity within the organisation.
Will the new head of human resources then, be playing a role in your view in optimising the tech environment? We note that there's been pretty slow progress for years in revamping the tech core, and meanwhile the Internet is changing rapidly under our feet.
- I think what we're looking for is a head of human resources who can help facilitate a really effective working environment in which people ... feel as though they're working on teams that are effective, that they are working with their managers to set clear goals, that they understand how their performance is going to be measured and evaluated. And ... the roadmap for the technology itself has to be set between the chief technology officer, the vice-president of product, in conjunction with working with myself as the interim executive director in order to move that forward. Now there's also a role to play across the organisation and in the community in terms of identifying priorities, for example in a slightly different model the community tech consultation that identified some of the priorities in terms of specific tooling for editors. We may see some more models like that around prioritisation of important tools ...
Well that brings me to the chief community officer which is another one of the key positions that's not filled, permanently anyway. I'm wondering what insights the new chief community officer will need if they are to contribute to the smooth implementation of the new product development process. To me, it would involve a more intimate knowledge of how the communities out there—the different language Wikipedia communities—how they go about their social process of adopting new technology; because we've seen the German and English communities for instance, in the past, be rather fractious about that. But then on some language Wikipedias you can just roll them out, almost without asking.
- I'm pretty confident that most of the time, we do work with the communities, on the smaller communities, to priorities and understand if they are willing to work with us on testing new features. What I would say though is ... I want to push back, and push back gently though, against the idea that this is something that's held within a chief title. I think that as an organisation we have a responsibility across the board with every one of my colleagues and the staff to understand and to work with the community and be sensitive to some of the concerns and considerations. Now that doesn't mean that every single person in the organisation needs to know how to work with the community to understand some of the social considerations about rolling out product, but I do believe that's something that we each need to own, and it doesn't fall to just the leadership of a department: it's something that we should all be conscious of and working together so that across the organisation, we're strengthening the ability of staff to work directly and effectively with community members, whether that's rolling out new products and features or whether that is supporting programs, whether that is through our grant-making process ...
Sure but the CCO is in a position of motivating and coordinating staff gathering of information, engagement with those communities about rollouts, aren't they?
- To some extent. Actually it's a split function, where the community liaisons work quite closely with the product teams themselves. So I would say that many of the community liaisons are almost embedded within the product teams and have some of the first-hand understanding and knowledge about the product development cycles, release cycles, movement from beta to production ... and yes, the chief community officer would set the tone for how we approach some of this work.
So with that organisation, those disasters—the Visual Editor rollout and the Media Viewer—might not have been as bad—they might have been smoother ...
- I think that we've learned a lot over the course of the years that we've been doing software rollouts and we still have a lot more to learn. I'm not going to say that the process is perfect—that's one of the reasons we've approached the development of a software development process, so that we have clear milestones that the community understand where we are in the process, and so that we as the foundation know at which points we need to stop, pause for a moment, consider, and engage. So I think what we're trying to do is to set really clear expectations. And it's not set in stone: if this software development product, the product process, seems as though it could be iterated on to improve, that's the sort of thing we'll continue to look to community feedback on.
Let's go to something more fundamental now. You mentioned before that in one of your previous roles, you had involvement in MediaWiki add-ons, the development of those. So you must be fairly familiar with MediaWiki. Isn't this the elephant in the living room technically, one of the biggest challenges we face? There's a huge technical debt that's really dragging on its performance and usability—it's slow, it's unwieldy, it's difficult for editors to use especially on mobile, and especially with poor connectivity. People have talked about two options: reforming it or replacing it. What do you favour at this stage?
- [Laughter]: Well I should be really clear. I am not deeply familiar with MediaWiki. I was mostly involved in the user testing and feedback around some of the user development, not actually engineering myself. In order to respond to your second part of your question which is around the future of MediaWiki, I think that there's a robust conversation happening within the organisation, and we do not speak with one voice; in fact we contain [multiple views] within the engineering side. Some people feel very strongly that we should prioritise MediaWiki core development; some people feel as though that's not necessarily within the core remit of the way that we progress our technical architecture; and others feel as though there is maybe an opportunity for us to bring in new non-MediaWiki non-PHP approaches while maintaining our open-source commitment.
So you don't at this stage dismiss the idea of a longer-term plan to build a replacement for it?
- I don't want to endorse a replacement for it. My belief is that this is a very interesting conversation and requires more thought. And that's actually one of the things I am very excited about the CTO position for its helping work within the organisation to define what that technical roadmap looks like. There are probably elements of each of those conversations that have real merit and value, and I'm looking for somebody in the leadership role, and I think the organisation is looking for somebody in the leadership role, who can identify what the strongest aspects of each of those arguments are, and architect some forward-looking vision and strategy that gets us to a robust sustainable architecture that will support our projects for many years to come.
OK, these issues really do go back though to the strategic priorities document that is in the making right now. One of its highest priorities is to expand what it calls reach, and that's getting knowledge out to people, explicitly mobile reach. And I think here we come to an interface between a MediaWiki that's not made for mobile, it's made for desktop—it always has operated for desktop—and the need to get more reach through mobile. Desktop traffic is declining rapidly, especially in the global south. Isn't it flogging a dead horse to put significant resources into just reforming MediaWiki, rather than replacing it with something that might dispense with the legacy-code problem and is good for mobile?
- Well, "I think those are all interesting questions" is how I would start and that's really again, I don't mean to defer, but I'm looking for the opportunity to have these conversations in a way that is facilitated and led by the technology part of the organisation. My understanding of where we are in development for mobile is that the teams have actually made pretty good strides—particularly the readership team—about how to improve mobile editing. There are certainly things we can continue to prioritise as product features and improve that process. So I think that ... I don't want to overstate and give credence to the idea that it's completely impossible and MediaWiki doesn't work on mobile—I think the team's done great work in that regard. What I do think is interesting in terms of your question is what are the sunk costs of our work within MediaWiki versus the potential opportunity space of creating something entirely new? And I suspect that it isn't quite as binary as that: I think that it is very likely that it would be very difficult to replicate something with the full functionality and feature set of something as lightweight and functional as MediaWiki, and I would be very cautious for us to suggest that we're going to abandon it any time soon. I think that what we're looking for is how do we continue to modernise this underlying architecture that runs all of our projects, and develop it in such a way that it is future-oriented, bringing in technologies as appropriate to help strengthen MediaWiki's resilience and robustness.
Can we go to something else fundamental? Again looking at that strategic document that's maturing on Meta, is the rationale for prioritising reach—getting knowledge out to people—firmly rooted in the traditional notion of Wikimedia as an internet destination rather than as a platform?
- Good question. I think that the rationale for focusing on reach is that part of our vision as a movement is to serve as many people as possible, and one of the things that we were looking at as we went in to the strategic planning process is what are the things that the Wikimedia Foundation can do that is of a unique value that other movement organisations can't necessarily do. And what we identified was that reaching a global audience is one of those things that we're uniquely set up to address in the sense that other organisations or affiliate organisations, that is not their focus or priority; they are mostly focused on supporting communities or language communities relevant to sort of the work that they do and their geography and their area of focus, whereas the Wikimedia Foundation is truly meant to provide the software engineering platform community resources to serve the world, and that is where we felt was something that we could have a unique value around increasing the number of people who have access to the projects, who can participate in the projects, and become a part of our global movement. And so that was really what informed it, as opposed to a conversation around platform versus destination. The reality of that conversation is that it's never binary. We are currently primarily a destination, but at the same time our contributions and content on our projects exist in many places in the world, including places we are probably not even aware of. So we are both a platform and a destination at this point in time.
But the future of Wikidata seems to play into this binary very strongly even at this early stage. In the document, there are a few mentions of improving Wikidata's functionality. I wonder whether the future, rapidly coming upon us, might start to circumvent Wikipedia's attractiveness as a destination by providing similar information to third-party sites—like Facebook, Yahoo, Baidu, and Google of course—without actually funnelling people into Wikipedia itself. Won't that bring us to a point where not that many people visit Wikipedia?
- I think that it's an interesting challenge that it raises, and it's always been a fundamental tension of the way that we as a movement have approached the world in terms of the way we license the content on the projects. When we made the decision to open-license the content on the projects, that was an implicit understanding that content would be reused, repurposed, including some of the snippets of information—the items of data that are contained within Wikidata—and that is something that we have committed to in terms of our belief in open knowledge. One thing that is exciting about Wikidata that potentially actually increases the ability of Wikimedia and the Wikimedia projects to serve as a destination, is that Wikidata will help us answer questions that are currently quite hard for the Internet to answer. We have lots of information contained in the projects that would allow us to, for example, run queries that could answer fairly complex questions in an entirely different way, or pull up related material and contributions and media and images in different ways than exist through major traditional search engines.
In which case, Wikipedia itself becomes less valuable.
- Well, I mean, less valuable than what?
Less valuable than Wikidata-provided information, structured information.
- Most of the data in Wikidata is based on information that's contained in the other projects, so I see them as deeply complementary, not in competition. If you look at the way that we've just recently improved the search functionality on the Wikipedia.org page—if you go to that and actually try and search in a variety of different languages, some of the information that pulls up is information, yes, related to an article in Wikipedia, but the tags below it are actually pulled from Wikidata. So they're highly complementary in the way that they work, and ultimately we anticipate that Wikidata will help us surface even richer information from across the projects.
OK, we don't have much time, but just two questions that are partly related to technological development. The traditional fundraising model depends largely on putting up banners asking for money on the desktop. Desktop is sharply declining and mobile fundraising, which is flatlining I think, seems to be less effective at fundraising. What are you going to do about that?
- That is a great question. It's something that we spent a lot of time thinking about, is how can we continue to be effective and responsible stewards of resources? And so one thing that we're looking at going into the current year's annual plan is that we're actually setting our budget target in line with our expectation of revenue, and we anticipate the budget for this coming year will actually be about three million below what our budget was the past year, so part of our approach is to be really responsible about the funds that we are planning for: the budgeting and the work and the programs, in order to anticipate and respond. The other thing that we're looking at, as I'm sure you're aware, is the endowment which we launched this year. Our commitment over the next year is to reach five commitments to the endowment up to five million dollars, and of course with the ultimate goal of the endowment being around a hundred million dollars over the next ten years. The goal within the endowment is to provide some of that security, stability, and support for the Wikimedia projects in perpetuity, as we face some of these questions around changing revenue models, and the idea is that will give us some time to experiment and understand how we can sustain ourselves and the projects and the communities. I think they're great questions and I alone in this room don't have the answers; these are questions that we're all going to have to ask ourselves and share as a movement.
Your responses to quite a few of these questions suggest that the organisation's going to have to take itself out of its comfort zone in the coming years. Do you agree with that?
- I do. I do. I think that's right and I'm happy being a little bit bold and saying that. I think that we are in an interesting moment of change for the organisation. We recently celebrated as a movement fifteen years. You're absolutely correct to identify that the overall environment around us is changing, and I think that one of the things that I've always appreciated about the Wikimedia projects is that they change in response to change around us.
And they resist change, particularly out in some of the communities ...
- They can. They can resist change, and sometimes that's a welcome reminder of where we come from, and what our values are, and so I ...
That's a very diplomatic answer, Katherine [both laugh] One final question, and it's in the short term: how do you plan to reassure donors in the short term of the Foundation's viability, after the upheaval of the past few months?
- Interestingly enough, we have heard a bit from our individual donors about some of their concerns and considerations, but one thing that hasn't actually surfaced as a concern is our plan to move forward with a new permanent executive director and a search for leadership. So I'm not sure that we're actually in a place around reassuring individual donors. Most people who donate to the Wikimedia projects are actually primarily interested in ensuring the health of the projects themselves, and so that's really their focus. And from that perspective, our projects are strong and healthy and they are the same today as they were at the beginning of this half[-year] ...
So you see the adverse publicity of the past few months as passing, temporary?
- I think what we need to do is to work to demonstrate that the organisation is stable and strong, and we need to prioritise the search for new leadership, at the permanent executive director level, and then at the rest of the executive team level. And if we're successful at doing that, and I believe that we will be, ahead of the major fundraising season at the end of the year, I don't see any reason for us to worry; I think that we're going to be fine, and I have all confidence in the fundraising team that we'll meet the targets that they've identified. So I think we're in a good place.
On that note, Katherine Maher, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to the Signpost.
- Thank you so much Tony, and it's always a pleasure.